NARRATOR: When we think of E = mc2 we have this
vision of Einstein as an old wrinkly man with white hair. E = mc2 is
not about an old Einstein. It's actually about a young, energetic, dynamic,
even a sexy Einstein.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: What would I see if I rode on a beam of light?

MICHAEL FARADAY (Dramatization): Perhaps some sort of electrical
force is emanating outwards from the wire.

ALBERT EINSTEIN (Dramatization): Energy equals mass times the
square of the speed of light.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN (Dramatization): Would you like me to check
your mathematics?

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And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to enhance public understanding of
science and technology.

And the U.S. Department of Energy, fostering science and security.

Major funding for NOVA is also provided by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.

NARRATOR: A hundred years ago, a deceptively simple formula
revealed a hidden unity, buried deep in the fabric of the universe. It tells of
a fantastic connection between energy, matter and light. Its author was a
youthful Albert Einstein. It's the most famous equation in the world:
E = mc2.

STATION MASTER (Dramatization): All aboard.

NARRATOR: But while we've all heard of Einstein's big idea,
very few of us know what it means. In fact, E = mc2 is so remarkable
that even Einstein wasn't sure if it was really true.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Albert, darling, you are later than I expected.
We've only got sausage and cheese tonight. What is it?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: We need to talk.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Has something happened?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Oh, no, nothing, sorry, no. I spent most of the day
staring out the window at work looking at trains, and I started to think about
an object and how much energy it had. Can I explain it to you?

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Of course you can, but first, dinner—food
and talk.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: I think the gods are laughing at me.

NARRATOR: The gods were not laughing at Einstein. He'd united,
in one stunning insight, the work of many who had come before him, scientists
who'd fought, and even died, to create each part of the equation. The story of
E = mc2 starts long before Einstein, with the discovery of "E"
—for energy.

In the early 19th century, scientists didn't think in terms of energy. They
thought in terms of individual powers or forces. These were all disconnected,
unrelated things: the power of the wind, the force of a door closing, a crack
of lightning. The idea that there might be some sort of overarching, unifying
energy which lay behind all these forces had yet to be revealed. One lowly
man's drive to understand the hidden mysteries of nature would begin to change
all that.

DAVID BODANIS (Author, E=mc2): Young Michael
Faraday hated his job. He was uneducated; the son of a blacksmith, he'd been
lucky to become a bookbinder's apprentice. But Faraday craved one thing, he
craved knowledge. He read every book that passed through his hands. He
developed a passion for science. All of his free time and his meager wages were
poured into his self-education. He was on the threshold of an incredible
journey into the invisible world of energy.

NARRATOR: Faraday had impressed one of his master's customers
and was rewarded with a ticket that would change his life.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Excuse me please. Can I pass, please?

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Can I pass?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Some of us are trying to improve ourselves, if people
will let us.

CHATER (Dramatization): Of course, of course. Pass, pass. This
way to a better life.

S. JAMES GATES, JR. (Physicist, University of Maryland): In the
early 1800s, science was the pursuit of gentlemen—something Faraday was
clearly not. He had a rudimentary education, he'd read widely, he'd gone to
public lectures, but in 1812, he was given tickets to hear Sir Humphry Davy,
the most prominent chemist of the age.

NARRATOR: Nineteenth century scientists were the pop stars of
their day. Their lectures were hugely popular, tickets were hard to come by,
and Davy reveled in his status.

JOHN NEWMAN (Dramatization): They're waiting.

HUMPHRY DAVY: I know.

NARRATOR: He was also a keen follower of the latest fashion:
nitrous oxide, or "laughing gas." He said it had all the benefits of alcohol
without the hangover.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Electricity, ladies and gentlemen, a mysterious force that
can unravel the confusing mixture of intermingled substances that surround us
and produce pure, pure elements. How do we do this?

S. JAMES GATES, JR.: Davy was an absolutely first-rate scientist,
however, many will come to say that his greatest discovery is Michael
Faraday.

HUMPHRY DAVY: ...unknown metals. Unknown that is until I, I isolated
potassium from molten potash and sodium, as I showed you last time, from common
salt. That same metal...

NARRATOR: Faraday may not have been born a gentleman, but he
wasn't going to let class barriers stop him from pursuing a career in science.
He worked for nights on end to bind his lecture notes into a book for his new
hero.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Lord, help me to think only of others, to be of use to
mankind. Help me be part of the Great Circle that is your work and love. Lord,
I am your servant.

HUMPHRY DAVY: This is excellent work, Faraday. So, what is it you aim to
do with your life?

MICHAEL FARADAY: My desire, sir, is to escape from trade—which I
find vicious and selfish—and to become a servant of science, which I
imagine makes its pursuers amiable and liberal.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Really? Well, I shall leave it to the experience of a few
years to set you right on that score. Look, I haven't anything at the moment.
I'll send a note if anything comes up.

NARRATOR: Despite this humiliating setback, Faraday was
determined to break free from his daily toil. His patience was rewarded.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Newman, meet Mr. Michael Faraday, he's going to be my
helper while I recover. He assures me he is a Christian fellow. Perhaps with
God and Faraday in charge of the chemicals you and I will be safe in our place
of work.

JOHN NEWMAN: Thank you, Professor Davy. Welcome Faraday.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Oh, no, thank you. And thank you, Sir Humphry.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Just stick to your job and do as you're told, and you'll
be fine, Faraday.

NARRATOR: Faraday became the laboratory assistant, eagerly
absorbing every scrap of knowledge that Davy deigned to impart. But in time the
pupil would surpass the master.

The big excitement of the day was electricity.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Another charge, Newman.

NARRATOR: The battery had just been invented and all manner of
experiments were being done. But no one really understood what this strange
force of electricity was.

S. JAMES GATES, JR.: The academic establishment, at the time, thought
that electricity was like a fluid flowing through a pipe, pushing its way
along. But, in 1821, a Danish researcher showed that when you pass an electric
current through a wire and place a compass near it, it deflected the needle at
right angles.

NARRATOR: This was the first time researchers had seen
electricity affect a magnet: the first glimpse of two forces, which had
previously been seen as entirely separate, now unified in some inexplicable
way.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Faraday, come look at this. You're the bright spark around
here, perhaps you can work it out. Oersted's reported an amazing finding. We're
just replicating it here.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Let's try the compass on the other side.

CHATER: Now, that is remarkable.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: But if the electrical force is flowing through
the wire, why does the needle not move in the same direction, parallel to the
wire?

HUMPHRY DAVY: Quite.

CHATER: Let's try turning the whole apparatus round.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Again, Newman.

CHATER: So, the electrical force goes this way, the compass points that
way. How can one affect the other?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Perhaps the electricity is throwing out some invisible
force as it moves along?

HUMPHRY DAVY: What?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Perhaps some sort of electrical force is emanating
outwards from the wire.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Oh, my dear boy, let me tell you that at the
University of Cambridge, electricity flows through a wire, not sideways to it.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Well, that may be what they teach at Cambridge, but it
doesn't explain what's happening before our eyes.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Now, now. Let's just get on. Let's swap the compass to
below the wire.

NARRATOR: Why the compass was deflected at right angles, why
the electricity was affecting the compass at all, dumbfounded Davy and many
others.

MINISTER (Dramatization): As we celebrate the marriage of Michael
and Sarah...

NARRATOR: For Faraday, however, the problem became an
obsession. It was a fascination inspired by his religion. For him the problem
was a way to understand God's hidden mysteries.

DAVID BODANIS: There is a small, almost persecuted group in London
called the Sandemanians. They were religious...not really a sect, they were
just a small sub-sect, sort of like Quakers. Faraday was a member of that
group. It was a very gentle, decent group. They believed that underneath the
whole surface of reality, everything was created by God in a unified
way—that if you opened up one little part of it you could see how
everything was connected.

S. JAMES GATES, JR.: Michael Faraday was someone who, like Einstein,
thought in terms of pictures.

DAVID BODANIS: Faraday was different from anybody else. He had a flair
for understanding his experiments, for understanding what was really going on
inside them.

NARRATOR: By methodically placing a compass all around an
electrified wire, Faraday started to notice a pattern.

DAVID BODANIS: What everyone else at the time had been taught was that
forces travel in straight lines. Faraday was different. Faraday imagined that
invisible lines of force flowed around an electric wire. And then he imagined
that a magnet had similar lines emerging from it and that those lines would get
caught up in this flow. It was a bit like a flag in a wind.

NARRATOR: But Faraday's great leap of imagination was to turn
this experiment on its head. Instead of an electrified wire moving a compass
needle, he wondered if he could get a static magnet to move a wire.

JOHN NEWMAN: I've never seen you like this, Faraday. You look like a
happy child.

S. JAMES GATES, JR.: This is the experiment of the century. It's the
invention of the electric motor. Scale up the magnets and the wires; make them
really big. Attach heavy weights to them and they'll be dragged along. But
almost more importantly, he's inventing a new kind of physics here.

NARRATOR: Although he didn't realize it at the time, Faraday
had also just demonstrated an overarching principle. The chemicals in the
battery had been transformed into electricity in the wire, which had combined
with the magnet to produce motion. Behind all these various forces there was a
common energy.

DAVID BODANIS: A couple of months earlier, Davy had been elected
President of the Royal Society, which was the elite body of English science.
But then he saw this great discovery published in the Quarterly Journal of
Science. I don't know if he was envious, but he certainly saw that this young
man who had been his assistant, this mere blacksmith's son, had come up with
one of the greatest discoveries of the Victorian era.

S. JAMES GATES, JR: Davy accuses Faraday of plagiarizing similar work
from another eminent British scientist, William Wollaston.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: So Faraday, what does Wollaston make of all
this?

MICHAEL FARADAY: He's written to me and assures me that he's taken no
offense, and he acknowledges that what I published was entirely my own work.

CHATER: Quite, quite. Davy is just being an ass.

MICHAEL FARADAY: But will Davy now retract his allegation?

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Sadly, no. In fact, he is still vehemently
opposed to you being elected a member of the Society.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Really? And what do you think?

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Faraday, my dear boy, you have my vote.

CHATER: And mine. And I believe you even have Wollaston's.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Oh, what a mess.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: Well, no matter, no matter. It's the science that
counts. So, tell me, how does this wire of yours spin round its magnet? What
mysterious forces are at play?

MICHAEL FARADAY: There seems to be an electro-magnetic interaction. In
my mind, I see a swirling array of lines of force spinning out of the
electrified wire, like a spiraling web.

WILLIAM THOMAS BRANDE: But invisible lines of force? It's all a bit
vague, isn't it?

HUMPHRY DAVY: Faraday, might I have a word in private?

MICHAEL FARADAY: Certainly.

HUMPHRY DAVY: Listen, Faraday, let's stop this nonsense. I want you to
take down your ballot paper from the notice board.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Sir Humphry, I see no reason to take it down. My
friends have proposed me. It is they who put the paper up. I will not take it
down. Good day.

NARRATOR: Faraday was elected to the Royal Society. Davy died
five years later, a victim of his many gaseous inhalations. In time, Faraday's
world of invisible forces would lead to a whole new understanding of energy.
He'd started what Einstein would call "The Great Revolution."

It was in the very heart of this exciting new world of energy that Einstein
grew up.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: My father and uncle wanted to make their fortune by
bringing electric light to the streets of Germany. From an early age I loved to
look at machines, understand how things work.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: I experienced a miracle when my father showed me a
compass. I trembled and grew cold. There had to be something behind objects
that lay deeply hidden.

At high school, they had their ideas about what I should learn, I had my own.
I was merely interested in physics, maths, philosophy and playing the violin.
Everything else was a bore.

PROFESSOR FRITZ MUHLBERG (Dramatization): Einstein, on your feet.
As you obviously know everything about geology, tell me how do the rock strata
run here?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: It's pretty much the same to me whichever way they run,
Herr Professor.

NARRATOR: Einstein's teachers tried to drum into him, as
Faraday had shown, that energy could be converted from one form into another.
They also believed that all forms of energy had already been discovered.
Einstein was going to prove them wrong. He would discover a new, vast reservoir
of energy, hidden where no other scientist had ever thought of looking, deep in
the heart of matter.

A hundred years before Einstein's birth, King Louis the XV was on the
throne of France, but the ancient, absolute power of the monarchy over the
people was starting to be challenged.

PATRICIA FARA (Historian, University of Cambridge): This was the
era of the Enlightenment, when intellectuals believed very firmly that the way
forward lay in science. And they felt that one of the first tasks that lay
ahead of them was to rationalize and to classify every single kind of matter so
they could see how it all interacted together.

NARRATOR: Antoine Lavoisier, a wealthy, aristocratic young man
decided to take up this task to see if there was some basic connection between
all the stuff of everyday life, all the different substances in the world. But
what worked for Lavoisier as a scientist—his meticulous, even obsessive
attention to detail—was also to be his downfall.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE (Dramatization): Monsieur Lavoisier, you are,
if my eyes do not deceive me, consuming only milk this evening. First you had a
glass of milk, now you are "eating" a bowl of milk. Will you move on to a plate
of milk?

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Your precise observations commend you as a lady of
scientific curiosity, Mademoiselle, most unusual. As you seek knowledge, so I
shall dispense it. For the last five weeks I have taken nothing but milk.

COUNT DE AMERVAL (Dramatization): Good god, man, I would rather
die than fast on milk for five weeks. Are you in the grip of some horrendous
ailment?

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: On the contrary. I am investigating the effects of
diet on health.

COUNT DE AMERVAL: Monsieur, with the greatest of respect to a member of
the Royal Academy of Sciences, your gut must think your throat has been
slit.

BARONESS DE LA GARDE (Dramatization): Marie Anne, how dare you
insult the Count? Don't forget what the Count offers. Not just marriage, but
think of how you will be introduced to all the Salons. You will be the toast of
Paris.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Would it not be a shame, Madame, to burden you with
the duties of matrimony before you have had a chance to experience your
curiosity for nature?

BARONESS DE LA GARDE: Shall we all go through? It's getting rather hot
in here.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Do you really plan to marry de Amerval?

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: There is a plan, but it is not mine.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Then I must contrive to save you.

NARRATOR: Lavoisier wasn't a scientist by profession. He was
the head of tax enforcement in Paris. His great idea was to build a huge wall
around the city and to tax everything that came and went. But his taxes on the
simple things in life—bread, wine and cheese—did not endear him to
the average Parisian. This scrupulous, fastidious young man did still allow
himself the occasional act of passion.

In 1771, Lavoisier married Marie Anne Paulze, the daughter of his colleague
in the tax office. Thus he saved her, as he had promised, from an arranged
marriage to a count 40 years her elder.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Allow me to show you something.

PATRICIA FARA: Lavoisier, I think, found his job as a tax collector
really rather tedious, and the times he looked forward to were the evenings and
the weekends when he could indulge his passion for chemical experimentation.
And he called those times his "jours de bonheur," his "days of happiness."

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Madame. What will happen if I take a bar of copper or
iron and leave it outside in the rain for months on end, Madame Lavoisier?

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Mmmm, Monsieur Lavoisier?

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: The metals what will become of them?

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Is this a verbal examination prior to an examination
proper, sir?

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: I merely seek the truth.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Then you toy with me, Monsieur, for you know the
truth. The copper will become covered in a green verdigris and the iron will
rust. I believe the term is "calcined."

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: When the metal rusts, does it get heavier or
lighter?

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Why, sir, I think you mean to trap me.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Then perhaps this little butterfly should land and
allow me take a closer look.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Every last citizen in France of sensible age knows
that when a metal rusts it wastes away, it gets lighter and eventually
disappears.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Ah, but...

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Huh? Stop. I have not finished. Contain yourself,
sir. There is more. In a recently published pamphlet by a brilliant young
chemist, Antoine Lavoisier demonstrates that the iron combines with the air.
It, in fact, becomes heavier.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Most impressive. I intend...

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Now whatever you intend, Monsieur, I intend to be by
your side. I will learn all I can about your science and become your worthy
colleague.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Then let me show you how the iron combines with the
air to form such a delicate union.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Tomorrow, Monsieur, tomorrow.

NARRATOR: Marie Anne learned chemistry at her husband's side, but soon
sought other ways to contribute to his work. She learned English so that she
could translate contemporary scientific works. She took drawing lessons so that
she could record in forensic detail the minutiae of their work together. She
ran their laboratory and was the public face of "Lavoisier, Inc." She was
central to the whole research effort.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Monsieur, that is a terrible thing to say. You are a
cheeky man.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: This way please, gentlemen.

Messieurs, it is my great ambition to demonstrate that nature is a closed
system, that in any transformation, no amount of matter, no mass, is ever lost,
and none is gained. Over here, please.

This precise amount of water is heated to steam. This steam is brought into
contact with a red hot iron barrel embedded in the coals. From this end, we
cool the steam, but, interestingly, we collect less water than we started with.
So clearly we lose a certain amount of water. However, we also collect a gas,
and the weight of the iron barrel increases. Now, when we combine these two
increases, the new weight of the iron barrel and the gas we have collected,
they are exactly equal to the weight of the lost water.

MEMBER OF ACADEMY: Aha! But is it atmospheric air, Monsieur
Lavoisier?

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: No, no because I am measuring it, to the very last
grain, I can see that it is lighter than the air around us, and moreover, it is
flammable. Voila.

DAVID BODANIS: Water is made out of hydrogen and oxygen. So what he had
done is get the oxygen to stick to the inside of a red hot iron rifle barrel.
He was basically just making rust, which is oxygen iron, but he was making the
rust really quickly. Now that left the hydrogen—what he called
combustible "air"—and that was just floating around as a gas.

No mass had been lost, it had merely been transformed, and now he wanted to
transform it all back into water.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: This is only the beginning. In the next few months, I
hope to demonstrate that I can recombine this combustible air with vital air
and transform them both back into water. I will recreate exactly the same
amount of water that was lost here in this process. It is my hope to complete
the cycle, water into gas into water, and not a drop lost.

DAVID BODANIS: For a long time, Lavoisier had suspected that the exact
amount of matter, the mass, involved in any transformation was always
conserved. But to prove this he had to perform thousands of experiments, and he
had to do the measurements with incredible accuracy. That's where his great
wealth from being a tax collector came in. He could afford to commission the
most sensitive instruments ever built. He became obsessed with accuracy.

NARRATOR: But Lavoisier's exacting methods were also starting
to anger the growing mob of hungry, disenchanted Parisians.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: Antoine, Antoine. Oh, wake up, Antoine.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: I'm sorry. What time is it?

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: It is almost time to receive Monsieur Marat. The
Academy asked you to assess his designs. He claims to have made a great
discovery. Oh Antoine, have you forgotten?

JEAN-PAUL MARAT: Monsieur, I have invented a device which projects an
image of the substance of fire onto a screen. You see, when a lantern is shone
through a flame we see a shimmering pattern above the flame. My device renders
the substance of fire visible.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: Have you collected it, this substance of fire? Have
you trapped it and measured it?

JEAN-PAUL MARAT: Well, no, but, but one can see it.

ANTOINE LAVOISIER: I'm sorry, in the absence of exact measurements, of
precise observations, without rigorous reasoning, one can only be engaging in
conjecture. So this is not science.

JEANE MANSON (Dramatization): Let me guess, Marat. The King's
scientific despot has decreed that your invention does not conform to the
version of the truth as laid down by the Academy.

JEAN-PAUL MARAT: Lavoisier, he talks about facts; he worships the
truth.

JEANE MANSON: Listen to me, my friend. They are all the same, the Royal
Academies. They insult the liberty of the mind.

JEAN-PAUL MARAT: They think they are the sole arbiters of genius. They
are rotten to the core, just like every other tentacle of the King. The people,
it is they who will determine right and wrong.

JEANE MANSON: Don't worry. In my next pamphlet, I will expose this
persecutor of yours.

NARRATOR: For years the Lavoisier's burned, chopped, melted
and boiled every conceivable substance. They'd shown that as long as one is
scrupulous about collecting all the vapors, liquids and powders created in a
transformation then mass is not decreased. Liquids might become gases, metals
may rust, wood may become ash and smoke, but matter, the tiny atoms that make
up all substances, none of it is ever lost. The crowning glory of this opus was
their remarkable use of static electricity to cause oxygen and hydrogen to
recombine back into water.

MARIE ANNE PAULZE: What is happening?

NARRATOR: As the French Revolution exploded, the royal family
and whole swathes of aristocrats lost their heads on the guillotine.

PATRICIA FARA: To the French revolutionaries of 1790, Lavoisier meant
one thing and one thing only: he was the despised tax collector who'd built the
wall around Paris.

NARRATOR: Lavoisier's job as a tax collector brought him under
suspicion. He was denounced by a failed scientist turned radical journalist,
Jean-Paul Marat.

DAVID BODANIS: What Lavoisier did was absolutely central to science and
especially to E = mc2, because what he said is if you take a bunch of
matter, you can break it apart, you can recombine it, you can do anything to
it, and the stuff of the matter won't go away. If the mob burned Paris to the
ground, utterly raised it, shattered the bricks into rubble and dust, and
burned the buildings into ashes and smoke, it turns out if you put a huge dome
over Paris and weighed all the smoke and all the ashes and all the rubble, it
would add up to the exact same weight of the original city and the air around
it before. Nothing disappears.

NARRATOR: A century later, all of nature had been classified
into two great domains. There was energy—he forces that animated
objects—and there was mass—the physical stuff that made up those
objects. The whole of 19th century science rested on these two mighty pillars.
The laws that governed one did not apply to the other. But young, newly
enrolled physics student Albert Einstein didn't like laws.

MICHELE BESSO (Dramatization): Good grief, Einstein, what
happened to you?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: It is more than a little ironic, having been
reprimanded yesterday by that idiot Professor Pernet for poor attendance, that
I should, in fact, attend a practical lesson which was as long as it was
boring, and utterly pointless by the way, only to be the victim of an explosion
of my own apparatus.

MICHELE BESSO: And so it was your own fault then?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Thank you. And how are you today, Fraulein Maric?

MILEVA MARIC: Extremely well, Herr Einstein. All the better for seeing
you have escaped the physics laboratory with your life.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Well, in order not to alarm you any further, I pledge
to forever continue my studies here at the Cafe Bahnhof, reading only the great
masters of theoretical physics and eschewing the babbling nonsense of the
polytechnicians.

MICHELE BESSO: Hah. That's about all you ever do.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: It's getting a little stuffy in here, Fraulein Maric.
Would you care to take a walk with me? There's something I'd like to discuss
with you.

MILEVA MARIC: Why, Herr Einstein, of course. Perhaps, you'd like me to
tell you what you have missed in lectures this week?

DAVID KAISER (Physicist and Historian, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology): Einstein wasn't exactly a model student. He excelled in
certain subjects, especially physics and math, but he wasn't very diligent in a
lot of his other classes. He was undoubtedly very questioning, which seems to
have annoyed most of his professors throughout his life. He would pursue his
fascinations with just incredible determination.

MICHIO KAKU (Physicist, City University of New York): We know
from his letters that Einstein, even from the age of 16, was literally obsessed
with the nature of light. Everyone he could speak to, his friends, his
colleagues, even his then girlfriend, Mileva Maric—who would become his
wife—everyone he badgered with the question, "What is light?"

ALBERT EINSTEIN: What would I see if I rode on a beam of light?

MILEVA MARIC: What? A beam of light? By what method do you propose to
ride on this beam of light?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: The method is not important. Let us just imagine we two
are young, radical, bohemian experimenters, hand in hand, on a journey to the
outer reaches of the universe, and we are riding on the front of a wave of
light.

MILEVA MARIC: I really don't know what you are suggesting, Herr
Einstein. Do you wish to hold my hand or ridicule me?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Ridicule you? No, never. I merely want you to help me
to understand. What would we see, do you think, if we were together, and we
sped up and up until we caught up to the front of a beam of light? What would
we see?

NARRATOR: It was Einstein's relentless pursuit of light, which
would bring about a revolution in science. With light he would reinvent the
universe and find a hidden pathway that would unite energy and mass.

Light moves incredibly fast: 670 million miles per hour. That's why
scientists use the term "C." It stands for Celeritas, Latin for "swiftness."
Long before the 19th century, scientists had computed the speed of light, but
no one knew what light actually was. Back in England, a man we've already met
was willing to make an educated guess.

After Sir Humphry Davy's death, Michael Faraday became Professor Faraday,
one of the most important experimenters in the world. The scientific
establishment still found it hard to accept that electricity and magnetism were
just two aspects of the same phenomenon, which Faraday called
"electromagnetism." But now he has an even more outrageous proposal for his
audience.

MICHAEL FARADAY: ...invisible lines that can emanate from electricity in
a wire, from a magnet, or even from the sun. For it is my contention that light
itself is just one form of these vibrating lines of electromagnetism.

NARRATOR: For 15 years, Faraday struggled to convince the
skeptics that Light was an electromagnetic wave, but he lacked the advanced
mathematics to back up his idea. Eventually, someone came to his rescue.
Professor James Clark Maxwell believed in Faraday's farsighted vision, and he
had the mathematical skill to prove it. Maxwell and the aging Faraday became
close friends.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Well, I thought you might like to see what I've
just published.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Oh, yes, yes, splendid.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: So your results show that when electricity flows
along a wire what it actually does is create a little bit of magnetism. As that
magnetic charge moves it creates a little piece of electricity.

MICHAEL FARADAY: Electricity?

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Electricity and magnetism are interwoven, like a
never-ending braid, so it is always pulsing forward.

MICHAEL FARADAY: That's wonderful.

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: Michael, Michael. There's something very crucial in
the math. This electricity producing magnetism and magnetism producing
electricity, it can only ever happen at a very particular speed. The equations
are very clear about it. They come up with just one number, 670 million miles
per hour.

MICHAEL FARADAY: I'm not sure I...

JAMES CLARK MAXWELL: It's the speed of light. That is the speed of
light. You were right all along, light is an electromagnetic wave.

NARRATOR: Maxwell had proven Faraday right. Electricity and
magnetism are just two aspects of a deeper unity, a force, now called
electromagnetism, which travels at 670 million miles per hour. In its visible
form it is nothing other than light itself.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Yes, but can she soar and dance like our dark souls
do?

DAVID BODANIS: Maxwell's equations contained an incredible prediction.
They said you could never catch up to a beam of light. Even if you were
traveling at 670 million miles an hour, you would still see light squiggle away
from you at 670 million miles an hour.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Do you see how she stares at that wave?

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Yes.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: You see how, for her, it is static? She and the wave
are traveling at the same speed. We see the moving through the water. But
relative to her it just sits there. So is light like that?

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Common sense would say that if you caught up to a
light beam, there would be a wave of light, just sitting there. Maybe it would
be shimmering, a bit of electricity and a bit of magnetism.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: So, if she was traveling alongside the light wave it
wouldn't be moving. It would be static. But Maxwell says you can't have static
light.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Maybe Maxwell is wrong. Maybe if you catch up to
light it is static, Albert, like a wave next to a boat.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Imagine if I were sitting still and holding a mirror to
my face. And the light travels from my face to the mirror, and I see my face.
However, if I and the mirror were traveling at the speed of light?

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: You're going at the same speed as the light
leaving your face?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Exactly.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: The light never reaches the mirror?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: So would I be invisible?

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: That doesn't make sense.

NARRATOR: Young Einstein was starting to realize that light
was unlike any other kind of wave.

Einstein was about to enter a surreal universe where energy, mass and the
speed of light intermingled in a way no one had ever suspected. But there was
one last mathematical ingredient that Einstein would need, the everyday process
of squaring.

Long before the French Revolution, scientists were not sure how to quantify
motion. Equations that explained how objects moved and collided were in their
infancy. A crucial contribution to this subject would come from an unusual
source. Meet the aristocratic, 16-year old daughter of one of King Louis the
XIV courtiers, Emilie Du Châtelet.

CHARLES (Dramatization): Quickly, father's coming.

NARRATOR: Emilie du Châtelet would have a huge effect on
physics in her tragically short lifetime. Unheard of, for a woman of her time,
she would publish many scientific works, including a translation of Sir Isaac
Newton's Principia, the greatest treatise on motion ever written. Du Châtelet's
translation is still the standard text in France today.

TUTOR (Dramatization): Musa, mihi causas memora?

CHARLES: Muse, my memory causes...?

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: "O Muse. The causes and the crimes relate; what
goddess was provok'd, and whence her hate; For what offence the Queen of Heav'n
began to persecute so brave, so just a man."

EMILIE'S FATHER (Dramatization): Do not be cross with your sister
because she persecutes many a just man. Only the other night Emilie silenced
the Duc du Luynes when she divided a ridiculously long number in her head in a
matter of seconds. You should have seen the incredulity on their faces when
they realized Emilie was correct.

CHARLES: Was it my sister's astounding intelligence or her boundless
beauty that made their mouths gape, I wonder?

EMILIE'S FATHER: Ah well, yes, you have a point, Monsieur.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Messieurs, I thank you for your kindness. I fear,
however, that my wit is only a curiosity to others. If only my mind was
permitted opportunity.

EMILIE'S FATHER: My dearest, Emilie. You are blessed with intellect and
courage. Use them both and the world will fall at your feet.

JUDITH ZINSSER (Du Châtelet Biographer): In one sense, she
is a woman utterly out of her true time and place. She is a philosopher, a
scientist, a mathematician, a linguist. She demands a freedom that women didn't
begin to enjoy until over 150 years later, a freedom to study science, to write
about it and to be published.

NARRATOR: Du Châtelet married a general in the French army at
age nineteen and had three children. She ran a busy household, all the while
pursuing her passion for science. She was 23 when she discovered advanced
mathematics. She enthusiastically took lessons from one of the greatest
mathematicians of the day, Pierre de Maupertuis. He was an expert on Newton,
and she was his eager young student. It seems they had a brief affair. But then
he set off on a Polar Expedition.

Du Châtelet then fell passionately in love with Voltaire, France's greatest
poet. A fierce critic of the King and the Catholic Church, Voltaire had been in
prison twice and exiled to England, where he became enthralled by the ideas of
Newton. Back in France, it wasn't long before he again insulted the King. Du
Châtelet hid him in her country home.

CHARACTER (Dramatization): The poor little creature is devoted to
him.

NARRATOR: Isolated far from Paris, Du Châtelet and Voltaire
turned her chateau into a palace of learning and culture—complete with
its own tiny theatre—and all with the apparent blessing of her husband.

PATRICIA FARA: There is a great deal of myth surrounding Du Châtelet and
her love life. And most of it is very exaggerated. But her husband did accept
Voltaire into his household, and he often went to Paris on behalf of Voltaire.
He went to his publisher to plead Voltaires' case, to keep Voltaire out of
jail. And it is also true that Emilie Du Châtelet did have several affairs of a
fleeting nature.

JUDITH ZINSSER: She created an institution to rival that of France's
Royal Academy of Sciences. Many of the great philosophers, poets and scientists
of the day visited.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Ah, Monsieur you are young. I hope that soon you
will judge me for my own merits or lack of them, but do not look upon me as an
appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar. I am, in my own
right, a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that
I say, all that I do.

NARRATOR: Du Châtelet learned from the brilliant men around
her, but she quickly developed ideas of her own. Much to the horror of her
mentors, she even dared to suspect that there was a flaw in the great Sir Isaac
Newton's thinking.

Newton stated that the energy of an object, the force with which it
collided with another object, could very simply be accounted for by its mass
times its velocity. In correspondence with scientists in Germany, Du Châtelet
learned of another view, that of Gottfried Leibniz. He proposed that moving
objects had a kind of inner spirit. He called it "vis viva," Latin for "living
force." Many discounted his ideas, but Leibniz was convinced that the energy of
an object was made up of its mass times its velocity, squared.

DAVID BODANIS: Taking the square of something is an ancient procedure.
If you say a garden is "four square," you mean that it might be built up by
four slabs along one edge and four along the other so the total number of
paving slabs is four times four, is 16. If the garden is eight square, eight by
eight, well eight squared is 64, it'll have 64 slabs in it. This huge
multiplication, this building up by squares is something you'd find in nature
all the time.

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: Emilie, Emilie, you are being absurd.
Why ascribe to an object a vague and immeasurable force like vis viva? It is a
return to the old ways. It is the occult.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: When movement commences, you say it is true that a
force is produced which did not exist until now. Think of our bodies, to have
free will we must be free to initiate motion. So, all Leibniz is asking is,
"Where does all this force come from?"

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Aaah, you're infuriating. You hide behind wit and
sarcasm. You only think you understand Newton. You are incapable of
understanding Leibniz. You are a provocateur. Everything you do is about
something else and makes trouble for you. Criticize this, denounce that. Are
you capable of discovering something of your own?

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: I discovered you.

NARRATOR: Despite the overwhelming support for Newton, Du
Châtelet did not waver in her belief. Eventually, she came across an experiment
performed by a Dutch scientist, Willem 'sGravesande that would prove her
point.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: 'sGravesande, in Leiden, has been dropping lead
balls into a pan of clay.

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: Dropping lead balls into clay? How
very imaginative.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Using Newton's formulas, Monsieur Voltaire, he then
drops a second ball from a higher height, calculated to exactly double the
speed of the first ball on impact.

So, Messieurs, care for a little wager? Newton tells us that by doubling the
speed of the ball, we will double the distance it travels into the clay.
Leibniz asks us to square that speed. If he is correct the ball will travel not
two, but four times as far. So who is correct?

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: Oh, Maupertuis, do not succumb to
her. There is no earthly reason to ascribe hidden forces to this Dutchman's
lead balls.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Well, the ball travels four times further.

DAVID BODANIS: Turns out Leibniz is the one who is right. It's the best
way to express the energy of a moving object. If you drive a car at twenty
miles an hour, it takes a certain distance to stop if you slam on the breaks.
If you're going three times as fast, your going sixty miles an hour, it won't
take you three times as long to stop, it'll take you nine times as long to
stop.

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI (Dramatization): Perhaps we might look over
his calculations?

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: I have already checked his figures. I am sure
Leibniz is correct on this point. I intend to include a section on this matter
in my book.

PIERRE LOUIS DE MAUPERTUIS: Really? Do be careful, Madame. Do you think
the Academy is ready for such an opinion?

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: Quite, quite. We really should be
careful...

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: "We?"

I see no reason to delay. There is no right time for the truth.

JUDITH ZINSSER: Emilie du Châtelet published her Institutions of
Physics in 1740, and it provoked great controversy. Voltaire wrote that
"she was a great man whose only fault was being a woman." In her day that was a
great compliment.

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: I am with child.

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: You are sure?

EMILIE DU CHÂTELET: Undoubtedly. Two to three months. I'm afraid...

FRANCOIS-MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE: You are afraid? Well you should
have...Oh, well, this child is obviously not mine, nor is it your husband's.
Oh, Emilie, Emilie.

PATRICIA FARA: Emilie Du Châtelet knew that in the 18th century, for a
woman to become pregnant at the age of forty-three was really very dangerous,
and all the while she was pregnant she had terrible premonitions about what was
going to happen.

NARRATOR: All her life Du Châtelet had tried to rise above the
limitations placed on her gender. In the end it was an affair with a young
soldier that led to her demise. Six days after giving birth to her fourth child
she suffered an embolism and died.

Emilie du Châtelet's conviction, that the energy of an object is a function
of the square of its speed, sparked a fierce debate. After her death it took a
hundred years for the idea to be accepted—just in time for Einstein to
use this brilliant insight to finally bring energy and mass together with
light.

Einstein pursued light right through university and beyond. Unfortunately,
he'd upset so many professors that no one would write him a reference. He
accepted a low paying job in the Swiss patent office. He and Mileva married and
had a child. The young family struggled, but none of it seems to bother Albert.

DR. HALLER (Dramatization): Einstein, I see you are busy as
usual.

Look, Einstein, you have shown some quite good achievements. But listen, about
your promotion, I really think it would be better to wait until you have become
fully familiar with mechanical engineering. I'm sorry, perhaps next time.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: But I wanted to hire a maid so I can get back and
finish my degree. Now I'll never pass my dissertation.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: But how will it be fine Albert? Do I have to just
wait another year, until you are promoted?

ALBERT EINSTEIN: All will be fine. All will be fine. You'll see.

DAVID BODANIS: There really is a very charming, but kind of a
self-centered streak to Einstein. He focuses only on his particular obsessions.
If the rest of the world fits in around him, that's fine, if they can't, it
doesn't bother him.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: What would happen if one applied those formulas to
electromagnetic radiation?

CONRAD HABICHT: Albert, you can't just borrow one bit of physics and
apply it, without proper regard, to a completely different area.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Why not?

MICHELE BESSO: Albert, I know you like the grand linkages, the big
theories, but wouldn't things be better all'round if you just got going in some
small area, got a university post. Get a decent wage, for God's sake. At least
Mileva could study again. Then she'd be happy and you'd be happy.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Ah, the vulgar struggle for survival, food and sex:
spoken like a true bourgeois, Besso. I want to know how God created this world.
I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that
element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.

MICHELE BESSO: Yes, but you can't feed your children on his thoughts,
Bertie.

DAVID KAISER: So it turns out Einstein was going for walk with his very
close friend Michele Besso. They'd studied physics together and talked about
physics and philosophy for years and years. They were very close. They had
cornered the question of light from every possible angle.

NARRATOR: As Einstein and Besso were ruminating on how much
time it would take light to reach them from clocks at different distances,
Einstein had a monumental insight.

DAVID BODANIS: What Einstein did was completely turn the problem on its
head. Other scientists had found it impossible to accept Maxwell's idea that
light would always move away from you at 670 million miles an hour, even if
you, too, were traveling really fast. But Einstein just accepted that as a
fact: light's speed never ever changes. Then what he did was bend everything we
know about the universe to fit light's fixed speed. What he discovered was that
to do that you have to slow down time.

LISA RANDALL (Physicist, Harvard University): His extraordinary
insight is that time...as you approach the speed of light, time itself will
slow down. It's a monumental shift in how we see the world.

MICHIO KAKU: The instant, the very instant when Einstein had this
brilliant insight that time could slow down, well the floodgates began to open.
You see, before then people had assumed that time was like a wristwatch on
God's hand, that it beat at a steady rate throughout the universe no matter
where you were. Einstein said no, that the tick, tick, tick of this wristwatch
was actually the click, click, click of electricity turning into magnetism
turning into electricity—in other words, the steady pace of light itself.

DAVID BODANIS: 1905 was a miraculous year for Einstein and for physics.
He had an unbelievable outpouring of creativity. It starts with his publication
of a paper on how to work out the true size of atoms. Two months later is the
publication of his paper on the nature of light. That's what will earn him the
Nobel Prize. The third paper, only a month later is on how molecules move when
heated, and that finally ends the debate on whether atoms really exist. The
fourth paper is published at the end of this half-year period. In it Einstein
sets out his theory of light, time and space. It was the "Theory of Special
Relativity" that changed the way we see the world.

NARRATOR: In Einstein's new world, the one true constant was
not time or even space, but light.

But Einstein's miracle year was not over; in one last great 1905 paper, he
would propose an even deeper unity. As he computed all the implications of his
new theory he noticed another strange connection, this one between energy, mass
and light.

DAVID BODANIS: Einstein realizes that the speed of light is kind of like
a cosmic speed limit, nothing can go faster. So imagine we have a train
charging along. And let's say it's getting up to the speed of light, and we're
stuffing more and more energy in trying to get it to go faster and faster, but
it's still bumping up against the speed of light. So all this energy, where
does it go? It has to go somewhere. Amazingly it goes into the object's mass.
From our point of view, the train actually gets heavier. The energy becomes
mass. It's an incredible idea. Even Einstein is amazed by it.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Look. I think I have found a connection between energy
and mass. If I am right then energy and mass are not absolute. They are not
distinct. They can be converted into one another. Energy can become mass, and
mass can become energy, and not just energy equaling mass. Energy equals mass
times the square of the speed of light.

MILEVA MARIC EINSTEIN: Would you like me to check your mathematics?

NARRATOR: Einstein sent his fifth great 1905 paper for
publication. In three pages he simply stated that energy and mass were
connected by the square of the speed of light: E=mc2. With four
familiar notes in the scale of nature, this patent officer had composed a
totally fresh melody, the culmination of his 10 year journey into light.

DAVID BODANIS: Here we are, for thousands of years, thinking that over
here is a world of objects, of matter, and over there is an entirely separate
world of movement, of forces, of energy. And Einstein says "No. They are not
separate. Energy can become mass. And crucially, mass can also become energy."
There is a deep unity between energy, matter and light.

MICHIO KAKU: "E = mc2." That equation shows that every piece of
matter in our universe has stored within it a fantastic amount of energy. The
speed of light for example is about 300 million meters per second, you multiply
that by itself and you get 90 quadrillion. So, in other words, what is matter?
In some sense, matter is nothing but the condensation of vast amounts of
energy. So, in other words, if you could unlock, somehow unlock, all the energy
stored within my pen, that would erupt with a force comparable to an atomic
bomb.

LISA RANDALL: After Einstein's fifth great 1905 paper, physicists no
longer spoke of mass or energy. They are now the same thing to us.

NARRATOR: Probably the most miraculous year in human science ends in
silence. The articles are published to resounding...nothing.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: I think the Gods are laughing at me.

NARRATOR: Then slowly it starts: a letter here, a letter
there. For four years Einstein answered each inquiry dutifully, trying to
explain his difficult, complex ideas to a confused physics community.

S. JAMES GATES, JR.: I love the idea that life just went on as normal.
Here are these universe-changing papers circling around, and the world is
struggling to come to terms with them.

MICHIO KAKU: Einstein had a fan club of just one. Luckily, it happened
to be the most important living physicist.

DR. HALLER: Einstein, Einstein. Max Planck has sent someone to see
you.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Max Planck?

DR. HALLER: Yes, he has sent his assistant. He's here to see you.

NARRATOR: Max Planck encourages the world's most eminent
physicists to take Einstein seriously. After four years of waiting he is
appointed Professor of Physics at Zurich University. From there his career is
meteoric. He is made Professor of Physics in Berlin, achieves world renown and
becomes a household name. He is the undisputed father of modern physics.

But Einstein's success was the downfall of his marriage. In 1919, he
divorced Mileva and married his cousin. His fame led to numerous
affairs.

E = mc2 became the Holy Grail of science. It held out the promise
of vast reserves of energy locked deep inside the atom. Einstein suspected that
it would take a hundred years of research to unlock it. But he hadn't banked on
the Second World War and the genius of a Jewish woman in Hitler's
Germany.

Twenty-eight year old Austrian Lise Meitner was painfully shy. Despite her
anxiety, the young Doctor of Physics arrived in Berlin determined to pursue a
career in the exciting, new field of radioactivity. Unfortunately, in 1907,
German universities did not employ female graduates. Luckily, one man came to
her aid.

OTTO HAHN: Yes, he suggested I speak to you. I need someone to
collaborate with.

LISE MEITNER: I think I could really help with the physical analysis.

OTTO HAHN: And the mathematics?

LISE MEITNER: Yes, yes, and the mathematics.

OTTO HAHN: Studying radioactive atoms has become so much a collaboration
between chemistry and physics these days.

LISE MEITNER: Yes, yes.

OTTO HAHN: I'll ask Fischer for a laboratory then.

LISE MEITNER: Excellent.

OTTO HAHN: I'll speak to you soon.

NARRATOR: Lise Meitner had just taken the first step on a
journey that would irrevocably change world history. For her, it would be a
road marked with success and renown, but also with terror and betrayal.

DAVID BODANIS: At this time, not a lot was known about the atom. At
first people thought it was like a miniature cellular system, there's a solid
nucleus of the center and electrons would spin around it, sort of like planets
around our sun. A little later, some researchers proposed that the nucleus
itself wasn't a solid chunk but was made up of separate particles, of protons
and neutrons. But then, in what are called radioactive metals, things like
radium and uranium, the nucleus itself seemed to be unstable, leaking out
energy and particles. Perhaps this was an example of E = mc2, the mass
of a nucleus turning into energy?

NARRATOR: Meitner and Hahn's collaboration to unlock the
secrets of the atom, started out on an extremely unequal footing. He was given
a laboratory. She was forced to work in a woodshop.

OTTO HAHN: I see you haven't set your hair on fire?

LISE MEITNER: Herr Hahn?

OTTO HAHN: The boss. He thinks that if he lets women into the Chemistry
Institute they'll set their hair on fire.

LISE MEITNER: Ah, so his beard must be fireproof.

STAFF MEMBER (Dramatization): Good day, Herr Hahn.

OTTO HAHN: Good day.

LISE MEITNER: You see. I am nonexistent to this place. At least
physicists recognize me for my abilities.

OTTO HAHN: Ah, yes, where would we chemists be without the steadying
hand of the physicist?

RUTH LEWIN SIME (Meitner Biographer): It took years, but Lise
lost her shyness eventually. In 1912, she and Hahn moved to the brand new
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry where their status was really that of
equals. Lise became the first woman in Germany to have the title of
Professor.

OTTO HAHN: Lise, I have news. You remember the art student I told you
of?

LISE MEITNER: Yes. Edith.

OTTO HAHN: Yes, well, I have asked her to marry me, and she has
accepted.

LISE MEITNER: Ah. Doctor Hahn, congratulations.

OTTO HAHN: Yes, well, I wanted you to be the first to know.

LISE MEITNER: I'm very pleased for you, very pleased.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: Lise Meitner was warm hearted by nature, she had many
friends, and she may have wanted to have a closer relationship with Otto. But
it really does seem that physics was Lise's first love, maybe even her passion.

NARRATOR: The 1920s and '30s were the golden age of nuclear
research. The largest known nucleus at the time was that of the Uranium atom
containing 238 protons and neutrons. Meitner and Hahn were leading the race to
see if even bigger nuclei could be created by adding more neutrons.

LISE MEITNER: So, the atom—pretty familiar, nucleus in the center,
electrons orbiting around. The nucleus is our focus: the nucleus, made up of
protons and neutrons. Now, the largest nucleus we know is that of the Uranium
atom. Its nucleus is a tightly packed structure of 238 protons and neutrons.
The thrust of our work is to try to fire neutrons into this huge structure, and
if we can get a neutron to stick in here, it will be a breakthrough.

NARRATOR: Meitner may have been on the brink of a major
discovery, but Germany in the 1930s was a dangerous place to be, even for a
world-class scientist.

KURT HESS: The Jewess endangers our Institute.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: When the Nazis came to power, one of the first things
they did was to drive out Jewish academics from the universities. Einstein was
very prominent, and for that reason he was one of the first to go. He was
hounded out of Germany in 1933. Lise was not dismissed at that time. She was
able to stay because she was Austrian. But in March 1938, Austria was annexed
into Germany, and at that point her situation became untenable.

OTTO HAHN: What is it?

LISE MEITNER: Frightening news.

FRITZ STRASSMAN (Dramatization): What's happened?

LISE MEITNER: Kurt Hess is going around saying that I should be got rid
of.

OTTO HAHN: I, I actually knew. I heard today. I was going to speak to
the treasurer of the Institute before I told you. We'll speak to him
tomorrow.

Come on, let's get you home. It's late. We'll finish up.

NARRATOR: The pressure on Meitner was unbearable. Hahn, who
was known for his anti-Nazi views, did his best to protect her, at least
initially.

OTTO HAHN: I need to talk to you about Lise.

HEINRICH HORLEIN (Dramatization): Not now, I'm too busy.

OTTO HAHN: We have to protect her.

HEINRICH HORLEIN: How? What can we do? The situation is the way it is.
Who knows what could happen next? She can't stay. It's just not tenable.

OTTO HAHN: But she hasn't got a visa or even a valid passport, and she
may soon be forbidden to leave Germany.

HEINRICH HORLEIN: We can't harbor a Jew. If she stays the regime will
shut us all down.

OTTO HAHN: Lise, Horlein demands that you leave.

FRITZ STRASSMAN: You can't throw her out.

OTTO HAHN: Horlein says you should not come into the Institute any
more.

LISE MEITNER: Well, I have to write up the thorium irradiation tomorrow,
so I have to come in.

FRITZ STRASSMAN: You've given up.

NARRATOR: When it became clear that Meitner would be dismissed
and probably arrested, physicists all around Europe wrote letters inviting her
to conferences, giving her an excuse to leave Germany. The Nazis refused to let
her go. In July of 1938, a Dutch colleague traveled to Berlin and illegally
took Lise back with him on a train to Holland. The trip was so frightening that
at one point she begged to go back. Despite the great danger, she got
through.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: She had lost everything: her home, her position, her
books, her salary, her pension, even her native language. She had been cut off
from her work just at the time when she was leading the field and was on the
brink of a major scientific discovery.

NARRATOR: No matter what privations she suffered, Lise was
still thinking of physics. Amazingly she and Hahn were able to collaborate by
letter.

LISE MEITNER: I hope, my dear Otto, that after 30 years of work together
and friendship in the institute, that at least the possibility remains that you
tell me as much as you can about what is happening back there.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: Lise was invited by an old student friend to spend
Christmas on the west coast of Sweden. Her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, who was
also a physicist, came to join her there.

NARRATOR: Back in Berlin, Hahn was getting strange results. He
found no evidence to suggest that bombarding the uranium nucleus with neutrons
had caused it to increase in size. In fact, his experiments seemed to be
contaminated with radium, a smaller atom. He desperately needed Meitner's
expert analysis. From afar, she was starting to suspect that something very
different was happening in their experiment.

LISE MEITNER: Hahn and Strassman are getting some strange results with
the uranium work.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: Really?

LISE MEITNER: A couple of months ago Hahn told me that they were finding
radium amongst the uranium products. We are looking for a much bigger element,
and here we are finding something much smaller. I urged Hahn to check again, it
couldn't be radium. And now he writes to me and tells me that it's not radium,
it's barium.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: But that's even smaller.

LISE MEITNER: Exactly. Hahn is sure that it's another error, but I don't
know any more. It is at least possible that barium is being produced.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: So Hahn still needs you to interpret the data.

LISE MEITNER: It is my work too, you know.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: Exactly.

LISE MEITNER: Well, I can't be there, can I? Come on, let's walk.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: Surely, he's made a mistake, hasn't he? He hasn't
done what you told him to.

LISE MEITNER: My darling, Robert, he may not be a brilliant theorist,
but he's too good a chemist to get this wrong.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: If you imagine a drop of water, a big drop, it's
unstable, on the verge of breaking apart. It turns out that a big nucleus like
uranium is just like that. Now for four years Meitner and Hahn and all other
physicists had thought that if you pump more neutrons into this nucleus, it'll
just get bigger and heavier. But suddenly Meitner and Frisch, out in the midday
snow, realized that this nucleus might just get so big that it would split in
two.

LISE MEITNER: If the nucleus is so big that it has trouble staying
together, then couldn't just a little tiny jog from a neutron and...

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: Yes, but if the nucleus did split, the two halves
would fly apart with a huge amount of energy. Where's that energy going to come
from?

LISE MEITNER: How much energy?

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: Well, we worked out that the mutual repulsion
between two nuclei would generate about 200 million electron volts. But
something has to supply that energy.

LISE MEITNER: Wait, let me do a packing fraction calculation. The two
nuclei are lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth of a
proton in mass.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: What? So some mass has been lost? Einstein's
E = mc2?

LISE MEITNER: If we multiply the lost mass by the speed of light squared
we get...200 million electron volts. He's split the atom.

OTTO ROBERT FRISCH: No, no, no. You've split the atom.

RUTH LEWIN SIME: It was an amazing discovery. Of course in the
laboratory we are talking about tiny amounts of uranium and correspondingly
tiny amounts of energy. But the point is that the amount of energy released was
relatively large and that came from the mass of the uranium itself. The energy
released was entirely consistent with Einstein's equation, E=mc2.

NARRATOR: Meitner and Frisch published the discovery of what
they called nuclear fission to great acclaim. But betrayal awaited them. Otto
Hahn was under pressure from the Nazi regime to write his Jewish colleague out
of the story. He alone was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery. In
his speech he barely mentioned the leading role of Meitner. Bizarrely even
after the war, Hahn maintained it was he and not Meitner who had discovered
nuclear fission.

LISE MEITNER: Now I want to write something personal, which disturbs me
and which I ask you to read with more than 40-year friendship in mind, and with
the desire to understand me. I am [now] referred to as "Hahn's long time
co-worker." How would you feel if you were only characterized as the longtime
co-worker of me? After the last 15 years, which I wouldn't wish on any good
friend, shall my scientific past also be taken from me? Is that fair? And why
is it happening?

DAVID BODANIS: Lise Meitner had been working on this for 30 years. She'd
only broken apart a handful of atoms, but that was enough, once she had broken
even one, the genie was out of the bottle.

What Meitner had started...after that physicists around the world began to
realize they could take it a lot further.

NARRATOR: In 1942, an intense effort to build an atom bomb was
begun. All over America, secret installations sprang up under the code name
"The Manhattan Project."

DAVID BODANIS: Meitner was asked to join the Manhattan project, and she
refused. She refused to have anything to do with the atomic bomb. But Robert
Frisch was different. He was an important member of the team, because he was
convinced of the need to beat the Nazis in a nuclear arms race.

NARRATOR: A nuclear bomb was never used on Germany, but the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the terrible
destructive power of E = mc2. Vast amounts of energy, in the form of
electromagnetic radiation, were released from a few pounds of uranium and
plutonium.

While the pure inquisitiveness of the world's most gifted scientists
ironically had brought humanity a weapon of mass destruction, the equation's
life has a parallel story of creation and beauty. Today, young physicists carry
on Einstein's quest. Ever since its birth, E = mc2 has been used to
delve into the depths of time, to answer the biggest question of all, "Where
did we come from?"

At particle accelerators, researchers propel atomic particles to the speed
of light and smash them together, creating conditions like those in the Big
Bang.

DAVID KAISER: E = mc2 actually tells us how the Big Bang itself
happened. In the first moments of creation, the universe was this immensely
dense, immensely concentrated eruption of energy. As it rushed apart and
expanded, huge amounts of energy or "E" were converted into mass or "M." Pure
energy became matter, it became the particles and atoms, and it eventually
formed the first stars.

DAVID BODANIS: Our sun is a huge furnace, floating in space, and it's
powered by E = mc2. Now it turns out, every second, four million tons
of solid mass of the sun, disappears. It comes out as energy. Not just a little
bit of energy, it's enough to light up our entire solar system, make the solar
system glow with heat and light.

MICHIO KAKU: And not only do stars emit energy, in accordance with
E = mc2, the whole process actually creates life itself. Eventually, a
massive star dies, the debris floats around, clusters together, gets pulled
into the orbits of another star and becomes a planet. We humans and the earth
we stand on are made of stardust; we are a direct product of E = mc2.

NARRATOR: Building on the work of scientists through the ages,
new generations are searching for answers. Using bold new tools that reach
almost to the speed of light, they can now ask questions that their
predecessors could never have even imagined.

As Einstein himself knew, the journey of discovery is sometimes painful,
sometimes joyful. It is as old as human curiosity itself and never, ever ends.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Einstein's Big Idea

Narrated byJohn Lithgow

Based on the bookE=mc2 : A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
by David Bodanis

A NOVA Production by Darlow Smithson Productions for WGBH/Boston and Channel 4,
and Arte/France,Tetra Media and Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. 0407104. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.